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Saturday, May 31, 2014

How Can Brands Fight Online Video Fraud?

In order to avoid becoming victims of online video fraud, brands need to institute internal screening methods and utilize technology from third parties, experts say.

A recent Wall Street Journal report shed light on the world of online video fraud, revealing that part of the problem is that brands don't always know where their ads appear.

"Lured by the promise of advertising they could be sure was being seen by the right people, marketers are now contending with a deep bag of tricks that includes Web-crawling robots, server-based 'drone pools,' and the pixel-size video sites that has them paying for dubious Internet traffic," Mike Shields and Christopher S. Stewart wrote in the WSJ earlier this week.

Large brands such as JP Morgan Chase, Coca-Cola's Minute Maid orange juice, and HTC Corp. fell victim to these "dubious" practices. So what are digital marketers to do?

But that's not enough. Those players haven't completely solved the problem, so advertisers must also be cognizant of not buying from shady sellers and they must insist on getting placement reports of where their ads are placed.

"If they refuse to give it you, don't buy from them," Fou says.

Fou also recommends changing the calculation of return on investment (ROI) from more ad impressions at a lower cost to something that actually tracks back to ROI, like sales.

"You have to balance reach with quality," Fou says. "More reach sometimes means you will get into low-quality sites, so reach is not everything because if a human did not see it, it is useless to you."

When audiences are aggregated at scale at enormously high volume, there's "a hell of a lot of volume for the advertiser on the demand side and they get very efficient pricing because inventory is bought in an automated fashion, where pricing for impressions adheres to the supply-demand efficient frontier," he says.

However, as soon as aggregation happens in the programmatic ad world, advertisers don't have primary control over their audiences, so they have to rely upon a screening methodology or use an external third party for verification to make sure there's no fraudulent activity.

On the supply side, because partners don't necessarily own or originate traffic, there's an opportunity for bad players to arise.

The best way is for participants in the value chain to have their own processes for filtering and optimization, in addition to partnering with best-in-breed third parties like Integral Ad Science, which is the way the industry is going, Slivjanovski adds.